P. J. O'Rourke

“As a former writer for the 'National Lampoon,' I've probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.”

“Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.”

“Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.”

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

“Upbeat is for people who want to feel good about their cause: the reformers, the progressives, the revolutionaries, the utopians, the collectivists, and the rest of the altruistic scum of the earth. Why do these people want to feel good? They want to feel good in order to convince themselves that they are good.”

“If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it's a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also - to do the lawn and clean the gutters.”

“There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans: race and religion.”

“The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon.”

“Any terrorism is an attack on libertarian values.”

“Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization - an appeal to civilization itself.”

“Obama's space policy doesn't differ much from George W. Bush's.”

“Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.”

“Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.”

“Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.”

“Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.”

“Iran and Iraq have been at war for five years now. The traditional present for a fifth anniversary is wood. Here's a gift suggestion: a big stick to beat some goddamned sense into their heads.”

“Obama, in pursuit of power, has been as greedy and irresponsible as any Wall Street tycoon in pursuit of money.”

“Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.”

“For decades in America, there has been an effort to ensure that the rights of those who are not sane are the same as the rights of those who are.”

“Marijuana is […] self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?”

“Democrats hate Democrats most of all.”

“One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.”

“Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.”

“Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.”

“No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works.”

“The District of Columbia is an extreme example of disconnect between financial input and educational outcome. Unfortunately, extreme is not the same as abnormal.”

“Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.”

“Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.”

“Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country?, contains ten chapters of fulminations convincing the convinced. However, Moore does include one chapter on how to argue with a conservative. As if. Approached by someone like Michael Moore, a conservative would drop a quarter in Moore's Starbucks cup and hurriedly walk away.”

“I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with their constituents. The electorate now has instant information about what politicians have been up to.”

“There are two organizations pushing for change in November — al Qaeda and the Democratic party. And they both have the same message: 'We're going to fix you, America.' On the whole, the terrorists have a more straightforward plan for fixing things. They're going to blow themselves up. Although, come to think of it, Howard Dean did that.”

“There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.”

“Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley!”

“A deadly sins addendum is long overdue. Life has changed since Pope Gregory the Great scribbled his initial list in the sixth century.”

“The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. Being a Republican, I'm backing Hillary Clinton. Because she could lose. The reason is not that she's a woman. The reason is that she's the particular woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in. Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is 'America's ex-wife.'”

“Jack Abramoff is the world's best lobbyist - for the Federal Penitentiary System.”

“There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.”

“She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.”

“Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.”

“A charity ball is like a dance except it's tax deductible.”

“I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I'm not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.”

“A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.”

“Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.”

“Weird clothing is de rigeur for teenagers, but today's generation of teens is finding it difficult to be sufficiently weird. This is because the previous generation of teens, who went through adolescence in the sixties and seventies, used up practically all the available weirdness.”

“The subculture of felons is in great vogue among adolescents. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so forth allow us Republicans to say to America's young people, 'We be thugs.' The GOP may capture the youth vote at last.”

“A woman should dress to attract attention. To attract the most attention, a woman should either be nude or wearing something as expensive as getting her nude is going to be.”

“Affirmative action makes employers think, 'Black woman nuclear physicist? Hah! Probably let her into Harvard 'cause they were looking for a twofer. Bet she got C's in high school practical math. Give her a job in personnel.'”

“Nothing makes an awful secret like a secret Negro... Up North, confess your bloodline freely. There's nothing a Northerner likes better than a black person who is completely white. Do not, however, try this trick with real blacks. They could give a shit... (If you travel in very sophisticated circles, you may want to turn Marcus Aurelius into Moses Schmeckle. Racism is very lower-class. Upper-class people are never racists; they're anti-Semites.)”

“Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.”

“Foreigners may pretend otherwise, but if English is spoken loudly enough, anyone can understand it, the British included. Actually, there’s no such thing as a foreign language. The world is just filled with people who grunt and squeak instead of speaking sensibly. French may be an exception. But since it’s impossible to figure out what French people are saying, we’ll never know for sure.”

“Liberals want to live downtown. All over America - in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown - there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.”

“A good bachelor drinks his dessert (and sometimes the rest of his meals). A sweet tooth is a danger signal that you're getting too much exercise and not enough cocktails.”

“Detroit's industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.”

“A steady job is at least as deleterious to the spirit of bachelorhood as a steady date. Some jobs are worse than actual wives.”

“Of all the American educational system's problems, none is more severe than the academic year beginning before Labor Day.”

“Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.”

“Bachelors know all about parties. In fact, a good bachelor is a living, breathing party all by himself. At least that is what my girlfriend said when she found the gin bottles under the couch. I believe her exact words were, "You're a disgusting, drunken mess." And that's a good description of a party, if it's done right.”

“Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.”

“If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.”

“Cleaning, like seduction, should be done from the top down — starting with the ceiling, which is ridiculous. Gravity takes care of that.”

“I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.”

“Despite the fact that meat is made from dead animals, it shouldn't smell that way. Try this test for meat freshness: close your eyes and see if you can tell the pork chops from a gym locker.”

“Even newlyweds don't spend much time together, now that few marriages outlast the appliance warranties.”

“For some mysterious Darwinian reason, women feel compelled to straighten up bedrooms before and after sex. Try to make love in every other room of the house.”

“Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.”

“If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it's a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also - to do the lawn and clean the gutters.”

“Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.”

“Never serve oysters during a month that has no paycheck in it.”

“Remember, your body needs 6 to 8 glasses of fluid daily. Straight up or on the rocks.”

“In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'”

“The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.”

“Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.”

“The real truth about children is they don't speak the language very well. They're physically uncoordinated. And they are ignorant of our elaborate ideas about right and wrong.”

“There's only one secret to bachelor cooking — not caring how it tastes.”

“You can keep the dining room clean by eating in the kitchen.”

“A child growing up in an excessively safe environment may never learn that he is one — not until he gets married and has a wife to tell him so.”

“I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.”

“Every generation finds the drug it needs.”

“Fishing ... is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.”

“Freddie Aguilar, who's billed as "the Bob Dylan of the Philippines." This is unfair, since he's good-looking, plays the guitar well, can carry a tune, and writes songs that make sense.”

“Some people say a front-engine car handles best. Some people say a rear-engine car handles best. I say a rented car handles best.”

“I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck.”

“Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.”

“By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.”

“Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.”

“In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters.) And everything that isn't fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe.”

“Northwest Ohio is flat. There isn't much up. The land is so flat that a child from Toledo is under the impression that the direction hills go is down. Sledding is done down from street level into creek beds and road cuts.”

“Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there.”

“TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.”

“Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since.”

“I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.”

“Industrialization came to England but has since left.”

“There's one more terrifying fact about old people: I'm going to be one soon.”

“Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.”

“There's something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.”

“Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.”

“The forces of safety are afoot in the land. I, for one, believe it is a conspiracy— a conspiracy of Safety Nazis shouting "Sieg Health" and seeking to trammel freedom, liberty, and large noisy parties. The Safety Nazis advocate gun control, vigorous exercise, and health foods. The result can only be a disarmed, exhausted, and half-starved population ready to acquiesce to dictatorship of some kind.”

“You may be surprised to discover you're rich, especially if you're broke.”

“The Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies is supposed to have subscribed to the Village Voice for six years in an attempt to find out about life in America's rural areas.”

“As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.”

“The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts— squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.”

“Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.”

“The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.”

“The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say.”

“People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.”

“These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.”

“I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.”

“Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.”

“To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage weltschmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?”

“I'm a political conservative.”

“Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.”

“One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.”

“Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport— two armed entrées battling to see who'll be dinner.”

“I read good. I was an English major.”

“Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.”

“I think it's always easy to be sympathetic to parts of the government in detail; in their concrete manifestations. Because obviously, we don't have government for no reason.”

“Everything on a boat has a different name than it would have if it weren't on a boat. Either this is ancient seafaring tradition or it's how people who mess around with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished college.”

“I like to have interesting things to write about. And when one says something is 'interesting,' one almost always means 'bad.'”

“Harvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage industry.”

“If we were to inspect ourselves or members of our family and our friends, we would see that we don't really have to go all the way overseas to be mystified - we can be mystified right at home.”

“I am no stranger to loud noise. I've been to a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels concert. I once dated a woman with two kids.”

“One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them.”

“I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners— two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.”

“I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.”

“I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.”

“I don't think anybody's really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory.”

“I've always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He'd have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with.”

“If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.”

“If Christ came back tomorrow, He'd have to change planes in Frankfurt. Modern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.”

“Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.”

“I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.”

“In Western Australia they don't even know how to make that vital piece of sailing-boat equipment, the gin and tonic.”

“Inside every Sancho Panza there's a Don Quixote struggling to get out.”

“Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please.”

“The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the '70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.”

“The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.”

“It had never occurred to us that the Kremlin's new anti-booze campaign would apply to journalists. Now, that's a human-rights violation.”

“I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.”

“Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.”

“If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words 'I don't know.'”

“Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.”

“As a longtime former resident of 15 years in Washington, I wish that everybody would stay off the Mall with their political cause so that we can get out there, you know, and play flag football or Frisbee, or walk the dog or something - you know, which is, you know, what the National Mall should be for, in my personal opinion.”

“One nice thing about the Third World, you don't have to fasten your seat belt. (Or stop smoking. Or cut down on saturated fats.) It takes a lot off your mind when average life expectancy is forty-five minutes.”

“We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.”

“Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.”

“America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God.”

“If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it's a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also - to do the lawn and clean the gutters.”

“The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborghini to the Grand Prix track to watch the charter buses race.”

“Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.”

“The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.”

“Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.”

“The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know.”

“If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat - in other words, turn you into an adult.”

“The interesting thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is where the bullet comes out, yet what a big difference it would make in your social schedule.”

“Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.”

“The Italians have had two thousand years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place.”

“Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.”

“The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German. For this, and several other reasons, Germany is known as 'the land where Israelis learned their manners'.”

“Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.”

“The most extraordinary change in Moscow was Arbat Street, the USSR's first pedestrian mall. Of course, there's something a little sad about a pedestrian mall in a nation where few people own cars— the whole damn country's a pedestrian mall.”

“Who, other than a crazy person, does anything besides hang up on a robo-call? Any call, any person, anywhere, under any circumstances.”

“There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.”

“No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.”

“There are probably more fact-finding tours of Nicaragua right now than there are facts— the country has shortages of practically everything.”

“Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.”

“They don't like anyone who isn't Korean, and they don't like each other all that much, either. They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, "the Irish of Asia".”

“There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.”

“People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.”

“To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.”

“What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.”

“War will exist as long as there's a food chain.”

“I don't even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I've never used a computer.”

“What would be a road hazard anywhere else, in the Third World is probably the road.”

“You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.”

“There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.”

“Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.”

“Never fight an inanimate object.”

“The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.”

“Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.”

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.”

“I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.”

“Marilyn Quayle was there, too, looking – it was indeed a strange week in Washington – great. She had her hair done up in something my wife said was a chignon, and whatever it was, it made Marilyn look considerably less like a Cape buffalo than usual. Though actually I admired the Cape buffalo look. I have an idea that – like a Cape buffalo – if Marilyn Quayle gets furious and charges, you've got only one shot at the skull. You wouldn't want to just wound her.”

“One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you're not in the Army.”

“Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation’s capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.”

“Politics won't allow for the truth.”

“The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.”

“Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, because they don't read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.'”

“We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.”

“Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country. So maybe he owes all of us an apology...”

“Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.”

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

“I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.”

“Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And — since women are a majority of the population — we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.”

“I was never a Democrat. I went from Republican to Maoist and then back again.”

“The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.”

“A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too.”

“There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.”

“Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.”

“All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.”

“There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is - certainly is one of them. But it's low on my list.”

“The collegiate idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.”

“If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.”

“At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.”

“College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.”

“I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don't let it bother me. I don't let it bother me for one simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.”

“A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitches. It's as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the 'Iliad' while playing a lyre.”

“If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.”

“You can't get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism.”

“America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being 'hegemonistic', of engaging in 'unilateralism', of behaving as if we're the only nation on earth that counts. We are.”

“You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; if you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.”

“A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?'”

“Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”

“A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.”

“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”

“The Tea Party has definitely increased political involvement, not only among Tea Party members but among people who oppose the Tea Party members. It's been a general stimulus.”

“There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself. Keep your hands to yourself, Bill. Hillary, mind your own business.”

“Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.”

“I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.”

“Health care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting Hillary in charge of making it cheaper. (This is what I always do when I want to spend less money — hire a lawyer from Yale.) If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.”

“And the Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers? Or maybe the people in Texas were attacked because of child abuse. But, if child abuse was the issue, why didn't Janet Reno tear-gas Woody Allen?”

“You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal.”

“Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.”

“Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.”

“A careful reading of 50 Simple Things leaves you wondering whether you're going to die from environmental disaster or intellectual annoyance. Failing either, you can worry yourself to death.”

“The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.”

“A pleasant natural environment is a good— a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.”

“A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty — their power and privilege — to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians”

“I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.”

“Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind, goddamnit!”

“Any person who has spent time outdoors actually doing something, such as hunting and fishing as opposed to standing there with a doobie in his mouth, knows nature is not intrinsically healthy.”

“Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.”

“Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.”

“Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my family is.”

“Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest.”

“Being gloomy is easier than being cheerful. Anybody can say "I've got cancer" and get a rise out of a crowd. But how many of us can do five minutes of good stand-up comedy?”

“Biotechnology is a worry. What if they take genetic material from wet noodles and blowfish and splice it into politician chromosomes and create a Clinton administration?”

“On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all.”

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”

“Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them. These two groups bring great pressure to bear upon politicians who have another agenda yet: to cater to the temporary whims and fads of the public and the press.”

“Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.”

“Crowded as the country is, is overcrowding even its main problem? Hong Kong and Singapore both have greater population densities (14.315 and 12.347 per square mile, respectively) than Bangladesh, and they're called success stories. The same goes for Monaco. In fact, the whole Riviera is packed in August, and neither Malthus nor Ehrlich have complained about the topless beaches of St. Tropez.”

“In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.”

“Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner's Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.”

“Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”

“Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free— indeed, sanctimonious— way for "progressives" to be racists.”

“Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.”

“Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.”

“Haitians weren't screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is.”

“Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.”

“The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.”

“I guess the argument of contextuality is that anything is okay as long as it's done by people who are sufficiently unlike you.”

“I suspect the Haitian Ministry of Health's principal contribution to health in Haiti is providing nice, healthy jobs to those Haitians with the connection to get them.”

“I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.”

“Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked "What's the big idea?" knows, most big ideas are bad ones.”

“If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions.”

“If the politics of disease are to be understood, particularly in the dreadful countries where this understanding is most needed, then the politics of total collapse have to be understood first.”

“If we're going to improve the environment, the first thing we should do is duck the government. The second thing we should do is quit being moral. Screw the rights of nature. Nature will have rights as soon as it get duties. The minute we see birds, trees, bugs, and squirrels picking up litter, giving money to charity, and keeping an eye on our kids at the park, we'll let them vote.”

“Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa.”

“In a society where commonweal does not exist, there are no duties, only exactations to be avoided, and no freedoms, only privileges to be grabbed. There can be no such thing as "public services" because nothing in the country is truly public. Everything is somebody's fief. And every fief must be exploited if the exploiter cares to survive.”

“In Japan people drive on the left. In China people drive on the right. In Vietnam it doesn't matter.”

“Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”

“Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.”

“It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). And this is not just a Somali problem. We have poverty and deprivation in our own country. Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last.”

“It's hard to come back from the Balkans and not sound like a Pete Seeger song.”

“"Malthus,", says Vice President Al Gore in Earth in the Balance, "was right in predicting that the population would grow geometrically." Al, as the father of four children, should know.”

“Man has been breeding livestock for ten thousand years and has yet to come up with a monstrous sheep that can trample buildings and graze a whole golf course for breakfast.”

“Mankind is supposed to have evolved in the treetops. But I have examined my sense of balance, the prehensility of my various appendages, and my attitude toward standing on anything higher than, say, political principles, and I have concluded that, personally, I evolved in the backseat of a car.”

“Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.”

“Most of the research about species extinction has been conducted on islands because islands are controlled environments and scientists can get drinks with little umbrellas in them there... Island logic also tells us that an increase in habitat size means an increase in number of species. But it doesn't necessarily. You can build your bed as large as you like and still get very few people to sleep with you.”

“Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.”

“On Friday, June 12, 1992, 110 heads of state gathered at Riocentro. They were indistinguishable in dress and deportment. Where was biodiversity when we needed it?”

“One thing that's certain about going outdoors: When you come back inside, you'll be scratching.”

“People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.”

“People with a mission to save the earth want the earth to seem worse than it is so their mission will look more important.”

“Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall gin-and-tonic is the way to save the planet.”

“Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.”

“Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty— their power and privilege— to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians.”

“Remember, FDA employees are serious about fear. We pay these people to panic about an iota of rodent hair in our chili, even when the recipe calls for it. FDA employees are first-class agonizers, world champions at losing sleep. When Meryl Streep got hysterical about Alar, they actually checked the apples instead of Meryl's head.”

“Saigon is like all the other great modern cities of the world. It's the mess left from people getting rich.”

“Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.”

“Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place.”

“The morning meal was served in traditional socialist fashion— very slowly, with the courses out of order so that the jelly arrived half an hour after the toast and the coffee didn't come until we'd called for the check. However, it was hard to be angry at a place that had ice cream, beer, and cigarettes on its breakfast menu.”

“The observers had a logbook recording the assaults, bombings, and artillery attacks on the area. Each page was ruled in vertical columns: DATE, TIME, LOCATION, DAMAGE, CASUALTIES. The columns headed ACTION TAKEN BY THE UN were completely empty.”

“The typical old-fashioned diet was so bad it almost resembled modern dieting.”

“There is a fine line in the Third World between half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe and half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe so they can throw you in jail.”

“Never fight an inanimate object.”

“Traffic was like a bad dog. It wasn't important to look both ways when crossing the street; it was important to not show fear.”

“Two key rules of Third World travel: 1. Never run out of whiskey. 2. Never run out of whiskey.”

“Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.”

“War is a great asshole magnet.”

“Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.”

“We tried to find the mayor. His secretary said he was at home. His wife said he was at the office. In Italy or France this would mean His Honor was having an affair. In Chabarovice it probably meant he'd run off to be a busboy in Stuttgart.”

“Corporate corruption has ecological merits. It's helping to preserve that species known as Democrats - thought to be endangered as recently as the year 2000.”

“When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it is (certain body parts excepted) done away with. But a public entity gets bigger.”

“In Toledo, people grow out. Out to the suburbs. Out to the parts of America where the economy is more vigorous. And all too often, out to 48-inch waistbands.”

“I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.”

“When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.”

“The one thing that's terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.”

“In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.”

“When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

“Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.”

“Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.”

“The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and health and retirement benefits working on the General Livestock Corporation assembly line putting udders on cows.”

“Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer. We can just step off the sidewalk. And sometimes we can get impressionable members of the opposite sex to perform sacramental rites with us. "Every drop of water wasted is a drop less of a wild and scenic river, Jennifer. We'd better double up in the shower."”

“I've only been to New Zealand once, about 1989. It was incredibly beautiful, kind of like the ideal of where I live in New England - all that and then some - but I can't say I was there long enough to get any very clear idea.”

“Soldiers are not policemen, and it's very unfair, even for those soldiers who have some police training, to burden them with police duties. It's not what they're trained for, or equipped for.”

“Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.”

“Harvard is the home of American ideas.”

“It's hard to be serious in life.”

“There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as caring and sensitive because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he is willing to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he will do good with his own money — if a gun is held to his head.”

“I am unboreable in the great outdoors.”

“Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.”

“Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.”

“My ignorance is widespread.”

“Writing is agony. I hate it.”

“My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you're fortunate - and both of us are - you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.”

“When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... This violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.”

“The people who despise America are the editors of the 'New Statesman.' Their green-card applications must have been turned down.”

“Maybe the real secret to America's greatness is that we hate one another.”

“The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.”

“I have no idea if some societies, anthropologically speaking, aren't really suited for democracy. I don't think that's true.”

“Satire doesn't effect change.”

“Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.”

“Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.”

“Everybody with a gun has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, you'd be crazy not to have a gun. Though, I assure you, all the crazy people have guns, too.”

“Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.”

“The prevalence of mobile homes does not correspond with the prevalence of poverty, or with much of anything else. All that can be confidently said about America's mobile homes is that they are massed in places where you wouldn't want to be in one. Florida's mobile homes lie athwart the path of hurricanes. Georgia's are in the way of tornadoes.”

“There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.”

“Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.”

“Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.”

“The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie, you're the Scary Dad. Never mind that no one has had an actually scary dad since 1966. The visceral fear remains.”

“When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.”

“Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.”

“To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt's is a slur on the poor.”

“I am a student of stupidity. I am a political reporter.”

“I knew that the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election would be interesting times. I had no idea they would rise to the level of an ancient Chinese curse.”

“When I board an airplane these days, all the middle-aged men are dressed like me - when I was an 8-year-old. They're in shorts and T-shirts. And it's not just on airplanes. It's in business offices, teachers' lounges, and churches.”

“Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.”

“I don't watch much television.”

“We the people of the United States, in order to dissolve what unity we have, establish injustice, insure domestic idiocy, provide for the common offence, promote the general despair, and secure enmity toward ourselves by our posterity, do ordain and establish this obnoxious political spectacle, the election of 2016.”

“The most futuristic aspect of the House of the Future was that it was made almost entirely of plastic.”

“Love can never be fully explained.”

“I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.”

“Show me one candidate who, like Millard Fillmore in 1856, has the honest decency to come right out and admit being a "Know-Nothing." At least the members of the Know-Nothing Party knew they knew nothing.”

“I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.”

“I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.”

“America's public schools have served their purpose. Free and compulsory education was good for a somewhat unpromising young nation.”

“The opinion was universally held, by the sort of people who universally hold opinions, that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush would be the inevitable winners of their parties nominations. And I trembled for my country.”

“The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they're living.”

“Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware.”

“The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.”

“But then — from the bottom of the campaign barrel with the lees, dross, and dregs — came Donald Trump.”

“I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.”

“Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.”

“The baby boomers' politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there's been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.”

“Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.”

“Trump claims to be worth billions, seven of them as of 2012. In 2004 Forbes magazine estimated Trump's net worth to be $2.6 billion. New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien looked into the numbers and came up with a net worth figure between $150 million and $250 million. Trump sued O'Brien. Trump lost.”

“In thirteen years, every aspect of the universe can change - ask a thirteen-year-old.”

“America's grossly unfair tax system won't lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief.”

“Just because a subject is serious doesn't mean it doesn't have plenty of absurdities.”

“Trump restructured $3.5 billion in business debt and $900 million in personal debt between 1991 and 1994. "Restructured" being the Trump way of saying he didn’t pay it. We Americans know a leader when we see one. We can assume that Trump will further America's economic growth the same way he's furthered his own — with bad debt, bad debt, bad debt, and more debt.”

“Moviemakers are rewarded with tax write-offs if, when seeking a location that looks like America, they seek it in America.”

“The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry - knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission.”

“Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.”

“The best case that can be made for Donald Trump is that American politics has turned into an unmapped and pestilent watershed in the heart of darkness, so let's send Mr. Kurtz upriver. To understand how the heretofore more or less respectable Republican Party wound up with such a repellent nominee it's useful to look at the other prospective nominees. And be repelled.”

“Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.”

“When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.”

“President Bush said that if illegal immigrants want citizenship, they'd have to do three things: pay taxes, hold meaningful jobs, and learn English. Bush doesn't meet those qualifications.”

“The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.”

“In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'”

“It would be completely unfair — and thus entirely in the spirit of this campaign — to single out one Republican candidate as an example of Republican candidates being so intellectually soiled that they lost the nomination to crap itself. As an example Mike Huckabee will do.”

“I'm fascinated by political enthusiasm.”

“Philosophy was once considered science.”

“The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.”

“America is experiencing the most severe outbreak of mass psychosis since the Salem witch trials of 1692. So why not put Hillary on the dunking stool?”

“As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone.”

“I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.”

“The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.”

“Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.”

“There are selves too big for one person to contain. You cannot call them selfish. There is nothing -ish about such selves. They are the self, as it were, itself.”

“I blame feminism and Facebook for the death of the American automobile. I'm a Republican, so I blame everything on feminism - or commies.”

“Everybody in America who didn't come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.”

“America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness - divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.”

“The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.”

“Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.”

“My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow... he wasn't evil or anything, but he was worthless.”

“In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me.”

“Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.”

“Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.”

“No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.”

“People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.”

“Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.”

“In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City.”

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”

“Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.”

“Why do elites hate the poor? It's xenophobia. They don't know any poor people - except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don't speak English.”

“I don't understand anything about America's culture.”

“Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.”

“The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.”

“Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that brightens life.”

“What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt.”

“Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.”

“Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.”

“I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a 'learning experience.' It makes me feel less stupid.”

“Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.”

“Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.”

“Jimmy Carter was - he still - he remains to this day America's most ex of ex-presidents. You just can't believe that we elected this doofus. He was a bright enough guy and sort of well-meaning. But he was about as prepared to be president of the United States as your goofy old uncle, you know, the one that memorises baseball statistics.”

“On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all.”

“There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees.”

“Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.”

“Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.”

“Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.”

“No Americans wants to see somebody lose their house because of health bills. Their boat? Maybe. Maybe the boat. But not the house.”

“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”

“There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is - certainly is one of them. But it's low on my list.”

“Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation - as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed.”

“Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.”

“Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.”

“Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”

“After all, what is your host's purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.”

“Freedom is for fun.”

“Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.”

“We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren't there.”

“Fortunately, I'm married to someone who's a pretty excellent parent!”

“Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca's day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real-estate developments.”

“Cars let us out of the barn and, while they were at it, destroyed the American nuclear family. As anyone who has had an American nuclear family can tell you, this was a relief to all concerned.”

“The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.”

“Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?”

“Americans are good at pursuing happiness. And the Americans who pursue happiness most diligently show that we're also good at running it down and killing it.”

“Politics is the one field you don't age out of.”

“People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'”

“My whole family can talk. They are all car salesmen. They are all funny.”

“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”

“Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace.”

“The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind.”

“I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.”

“The budget doesn't have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn't have much control over the budget.”

“Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.”

“You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.”

“Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.”

“I live in rural New Hampshire, and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we're short on people. My town has a population of 301.”

“The First Amendment only says 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' It can disrespect all it wants.”

“Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it's got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It's not pretty. But it's striking, I'll give it that. It's not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.”

“I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.”

“You're never going to read 'The Wealth of Nations,' and you shouldn't, really. It's 900 pages.”

“Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren't present.”

“Global warming is a fact. Now it's up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial importance in preventing powerful, greedy free market forces from getting in the way of worsening storms and rising sea levels. The Kyoto Accord is a good first step.”

“Kids are disorganized.”

“People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it's the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.”

“People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.”

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

“I think every high school student who was alert during the early '60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.”

“By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.”

“The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.”

“Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.”

“In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.”

“The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.”

“Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.”

“Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.”

“The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.”

“Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician.”

“The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?”

“Why can't death - if we must have it - be always glorious, as in 'The Iliad?'”

“I'm too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom's earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.”

“I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I've got beachfront property. You tell us up there, 'By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,' and we say, 'Your point is?'”

“In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'”

“After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States.”

“Call a man 'ignorant,' and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.”

“The foundation of collectivism is simple: There should be no important economic differences among people. No one should be too rich.”

“The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.”

“Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.”

“You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.”

“The bar is set pretty low if you want to be a hip, accessible conservative.”

“Something that confirms all fears and many conspiracy theories about government is finding out what our elected representatives would put into law if they could.”

“All religions must be made child-proof. Our teachers' unions have done good work in this field, K through 12. Delaying first communions and bar mitzvahs until age 21 would be another positive step.”

“Disney's House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war.”

“The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.”

“I knew Hunter Thompson since the '70s, and I loved him, but he would wear me out as I got older.”

“People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.”

“My life would have gone along perfectly well, politically speaking, if it hadn't been for girls.”

“Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.”

“Disney's Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative.”

“I'm not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling.”

“There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency, and scoreless sports ties are boring.”

“Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.”

“Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.”

“My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you're fortunate - and both of us are - you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.”

“Never fight an inanimate object.”

“Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.”

“I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.”

“The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay.”

“In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America.”

“I'm really tired of virtue.”

“Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-'60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate.”

“Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.”

“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”

“The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.”

“The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.”

“If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions.”

“The job of the president of the United States is to talk to the public, is to explain to them. Now, some presidents talk too much, like Bill Clinton. Some presidents try to talk but don't know how, like George Bush senior.”

“When you're a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't want to be doing that.' They're on your side.”

“Regulation creates a moral hazard.”

“Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.”

“Never fight an inanimate object.”

“If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.”

“Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.”

“Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.”

“I think the Baby Boom has enjoyed itself, maybe sometimes a little too much, and we're continuing to enjoy ourselves, maybe a little too much.”

“If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I'd claim it was forced on our country by a sinister international organization.”

“Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.”

“People love to be told what they know already.”

“There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.”

“I've got a 1990 Porsche 911. It's just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.”

“Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.”

“In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America.”

“I like to argue with the radio.”

“The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.”

“Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do.”

“I rarely meet a politician that I don't like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.”

“All religious believers should be licensed to make sure that they are competent to hold opinions and viewpoints and that they don't believe in just any old thing, such as creationism or a flat tax.”

“You've got to understand, people are motivated by fun. And they should be.”

“When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.”

“I myself am a parent in a small business. Number of employees: one.”

“In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's different.'”

“If ever there were a place where people not only tend not to face economic facts, but it's almost their purpose not to face economic facts, it's Washington.”

“War diminishes both civil and economic rights.”

“We all know the types who listen to Pete Seeger songs; even Pete admits they aren't interesting.”

“We've come into the world of '1984,' but it turns out to be '1984'-Lite.”

“Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help?”

“The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.”

“Simply because something is a populist movement doesn't make it either good or bad.”

“Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.”

“You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.”

“I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.”

“I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.”

“My generation of Americans was the first to really care about racism and sexism, not to mention the I Ching, plus, of course, the Earth.”

“A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you're managing the U.S. Mint, buy a penny.”

“If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.”

“Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it's number 1,000,000,001.”

“The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can't do, shouldn't do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.”

“I'm on Medicare now. If I go and have a big operation, it costs me nothing. It should cost me a little. I'm not rich, but I can afford a few grand if I have to have my appendix taken out. I can pitch in a little bit.”

“Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.”

“The idea of a world where all people are alike - in wealth or in anything else - is a fantasy for the stupid.”

“Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.”

“I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.”

“I have never been to a museum in Hong Kong, or a movie or a play. I've never gone club-hopping. I've never taken the tram to Victoria Peak.”

“Toledo is better than exciting, it's happy. Because nothing is more conducive to unhappiness than taking yourself seriously, and taking yourself seriously is difficult when you're baseball team is the Mud Hens.”

“Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.”

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

“Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.”

“Rahm Emanuel is, we are almost certain, a vampire.”

“There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.”

“The purpose of sports - even foreign sports - is not to bore people.”

“Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.”

“If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.”

“I've never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about.”

“Like it or not, I've come to appreciate soccer. Any kid can play, which fits with the inclusive agenda of progressive schools. Although the corollary to 'any kid can play' is that every kid must play because there is an iron grip to the warm hug of progressive inclusionism.”

“The good thing about SUVs is they have storage.”

“Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the liberal elite. And we can't blame taxpayers for being reluctant to subsidize the reportorial careers of J-school twerps who should have joined the Peace Corps and gone to Africa to 'speak truth to power' to Robert Mugabe.”

“Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.”

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

“The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them to be responsible on the various adventures they have on their way to those goals, good, bad, and otherwise.”

“Jeans fit the mature male one of two ways, both dirigible in nature. You make a public impression that's either Hindenburg or Goodyear blimp.”

“When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he's saving a parking place.”

“My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow... he wasn't evil or anything, but he was worthless.”

“Voting has proliferated in the United States, and it has reached a point where there is now almost one vote available per citizen over the age of eighteen.”

“Never wear anything that panics the cat.”

“The two most frightening words in Washington are 'bipartisan consensus.' Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.”

“Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.”

“I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.”

“A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It's a promissory note that doesn't actually promise anything. It's not backed by gold or silver.”

“Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.”

“The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.”

“We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.”

“Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.”

“You're not a baby boomer if you don't have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate.”

“Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.”

“The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.”

“Fascism is very much a mob movement.”

“I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh; therefore I usually don't listen to him.”

“Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.”

“Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-workers and so on, but actually hate the job they do.”

“'You're stupid,' is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.”

“I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.”

“Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won't dig up the pretty lawn, won't plant anything for fear of getting dirty, and they use fragrant bath salts from The Body Shop instead of smelly compost.”

“Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.”

“Even Jimmy Carter can't be wrong all the time.”

“I'm a rather decisive type.”

“A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too.”

“Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.”

“Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.”

“Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.”

“All previous populist movements were demanding things from governments, whereas the Tea Party is saying, 'Give us less, go away.' That's heartening to see.”

“A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.”

“The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.”

“The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.”

“What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians - whatever those motives may be - is that politicians must announce their motives as visionary and grand.”

“Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn't matter.”

“America is a meritocracy.”

“Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.”

“Liberals consider people to be nuisances.”

“Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.”

“We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.”

“A 'farm' today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall.”

“If you spend 72 hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. Either that or you're President Obama.”

“Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.”

“There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.”

“Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.”

“Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn't exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.”

“Stupid is a great force in human affairs.”

“We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.”

“There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.”

“America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.”

“Politics is - once in a while - a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.”

“All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.”

“You can't destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America's elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you're doing us a favor.”

“The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin.”

“Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.”

“The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and health and retirement benefits working on the General Livestock Corporation assembly line putting udders on cows.”

“When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.”

“Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.”

“War expands government powers. The trouble is that, when the war goes away, the government powers do not.”

“The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.”

“Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.”

“They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, 'But doesn't it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn't it be set in New Guinea?' And you say, 'But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.'”

“Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.”

“Space has always been confusing to politics.”

“There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.”

“The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer's cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.”

“Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.”

“When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.”

“The words 'Space Age' have a quaint, nostalgic tone - sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching 'The Jetsons.'”

“Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.”

“It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.”

“The 18,000 NASA employees are full of galactic talents and abilities and are ready to accomplish whatever they're directed to do.”

“Demolishing pretensions, especially worthy ones, is a hallmark of the baby boom.”

“We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.”

“Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.”

“Charles McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue - by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure.”

“The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.”

“Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it.”

“The laws of the marketplace are physical laws, and they don't become suspended in a crisis any more than the law of gravity does.”

“The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.”

“Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.”

“President Obama has contempt for real money.”

“Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives.”

“Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.”

“There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It's going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it's the Democrats.”

“There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.”

“Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace.”

“In a free country, government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference.”

“Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.”

“The killjoys initiated automobile crash standards so rigorous that we can't buy a car that hasn't been dropped from the top of a phone pole with our whole family strapped inside.”

“When you pay a hospital bill, you're really paying two hospital bills - one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital. and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital.”

“Democrats hate success.”

“Rich people don't like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don't go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.”

“The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that's the point.”

“My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.”

“There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.”

“Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude.”

“To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.”

“Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.”

“More modern poetry is written than read.”

“I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.”

“No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.”

“Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.”

“Health care's not about insurance! Health care's about getting treatment.”

“Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He's a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he's such an excellent banjo player that you almost don't wish you had a pair of wire cutters.”

“As murderous industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald's.”

“It's better to make fun of yourself because you've always got someone around to make fun of, and they can't sue you.”

“Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.”

“Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.”

“I have never Twittered or Tweeted or even Chirped.”

“In the Soviet Union, no industry went under until they all did.”

“There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.”

“I think the Baby Boom does have a tendency to get its nose in everything. The Greatest Generation had a better tendency to leave people alone. Of course, they also had a better tendency to hate everybody's guts.”

“Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.”

“I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper.”

“All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.”

“The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.”

“Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.”

“I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.”

“Politicians will talk strategy and tactics and policies and programs until they're blue in the face, or you strangle them and they turn blue.”

“Guns are the ultimate bulwark against government misbehavior.”

“Opinions of language are as interesting as opinions of arithmetic.”

“Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples.”

“Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.”

“Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.”

“The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It's a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.”

“I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.”

“Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.”

“The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.”

“The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.”

“A friend of mine at the American Enterprise Institute says there are two parties: the silly party and the stupid party. I'm too old for the silly party, so I had to join the stupid party.”

“Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of progress.”

“There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.”

“Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box.”

“The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they've shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative.”

“America is not doctrinaire. It's hard for an American politician to come up with an ideological position that is permanently unforgivable.”

“Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.”

“China is trying to become America without democracy while America is trying to become France without cheese calories.”

“I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.”

“Are you a Democrat because you're a union member? Then why, after eight years of Bill Clinton, does some Chinese guy in Guangdong province have your job?”

“Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jury duty.”

“Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you're handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it's over.”

“Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree.”

“If you want to join the Republican party, they have to let you in. There's nothing they can do about it. I mean, if Republicans will take Al D'Amato, they'll take anybody.”

“New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State's registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they're going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can't understand what they say.”

“Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.”

“I believe in God. God created the world.”

“Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.”

“There are a number of Americans who shouldn't vote. The number is 57 percent, to judge by the combined total of Clinton and Perot ballots in the 1996 presidential election.”

“There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.”

“The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.”

“The great apologist has to have lived large and wild. If he's going to kiss the world's boo-boos and make up, he'd better plant some bruises first. A master apologizer has to be a Lord Byron, a Rick in Casablanca, a Lee Atwater, anyway.”

“The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.”

“A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.”

“Detroit is beautiful - though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it.”

“The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.”

“What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I've received a spam text.”

“Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.”

“I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.”

“When you pay a hospital bill, you're really paying two hospital bills - one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital. and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital.”

“Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.”

“Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.”

“Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs.”

“In midlife, we're as dumb as we get.”

“Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.”

“We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.”

“Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.”

“Of course, no one wants to ban the vote. Voting should remain available for sporting and recreational purposes. But certain types of votes clearly should be curtailed - 'assault votes,' for example, in which the only purpose of the vote is to harm others.”

“Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let's hope so.”

“A person has got to balance work and life and family in order to be a balanced person.”